Peter J. Pitts

Peter Pitts is President of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest. A former member of the United States Senior Executive Service, Peter was FDA’s Associate Commissioner for External Relations, serving as senior communications and policy adviser to the Commissioner. He supervised FDA’s Office of Public Affairs, Office of the Ombudsman, Office of Special Health Issues, Office of Executive Secretariat, and Advisory Committee Oversight and Management. He served on the agency’s obesity working group and counterfeit drug taskforce and is a Special Government Employee (SGE) consultant to the FDA’s Risk Communications Advisory Committee.

In 2010, he was named by Modern Healthcare magazine as one of the 300 “most powerful people in American healthcare.”

His comments and commentaries on health care policy issues regularly appear inThe New York Times,The Los Angeles Times,The Washington Post,The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, Health Affairs, The Boston Globe, The Washington Times, TheChicago Tribune, The Chicago Sun Times, The San Francisco Examiner, Investor’s Business Daily, The Baltimore Sun, The Economist, Nature Biotechnology, The Journal of Life Sciencesthe BBC World Service, Fox News, and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, among others.

His book, Become Strategic or Die, is widely recognized as a cutting edge study of how leadership, in order to be successful over the long term, must be combined with strategic vision and ethical practice. He is the editor of Coincidence or Crisis, a discussion of global prescription medicine counterfeiting and Physician Disempowerment: A Transatlantic Malaise.

He has served as an adjunct professor at Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs and Butler University. A graduate of McGill University, he is married to Jane Mogel, and has two sons.